Is America the Real Victim of Anti-Russia Sanctions?

By misjudging the size and importance of Russia’s economy, the West might have taken steps toward its own isolation

Remember the claims that Russia’s economy was more or less irrelevant, merely the equivalent of a small, not very impressive European country? “Putin, who has an economy the size of Italy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea, “[is] playing a poker game with a pair of twos and winning.” Of increasing Russian diplomatic and geopolitical influence in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, The Economist asked in 2019, “How did a country with an economy the size of Spain … achieve all this?”

Seldom has the West so grossly misjudged an economy’s global significance.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/is-america-the-real-victim-of-anti-russia-sanctions